The Land Speed Record and Working At Height Limited

Working At Height Limited are a UK company that sells globally, each day we innovate with new platform designs to ensure that our customers work at height safely and productively, it is this engineering innovation and expertise that has ‘driven’ us towards supporting Bloodhound SSC, the latest attempt by ‘Great Britain’ to break the land speed record, and to become an official product sponsor to the project and exclusive ‘Work At Height’ supplier and advisors.

The project is headed by Richard Noble OBE, when Richard and his team approached us they led with their passion to educate and to instill those of school age now that they can enter the world of engineering and science and become the designers, inventors and scientists of the next generation, they and the UK government recognise and know that there has been a steady decline in young people taking up university places that cover these subjects and that if this continues we shall start to lag behind the rest of the world.

And ‘lag’ is not a word you can associate with a car that will in 2015/16 not only break the land speed record but breakthrough the 1000 mph barrier. And some of the world’s leading brands and corporations have not been slow in coming forward to support the project and to be associated with it.

This is not a ‘one horse race’, there are two other nations seriously trying to prise the record from Britain and the British, America have a car just about ready to go with ‘North American Eagle’* and Australia have a car in build, the ‘Aussie Invader’*. But Bloodhound SSC is jet and rocket powered and designed to pass 1,000 mph (1,600 kph) and the engines produce more than 135,000 horsepower, more than 6 times the power of all the Formula 1 cars on a starting grid put together! (* Correct as of February 2014.)

So the UK needs Bloodhound SSC, but why does Bloodhound need Working At Height Limited? Well launching Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green once again through the sound barrier, as he achieved in Thrust SSC in 1997, and the first and still the only man to have driven through the sound barrier, starts with safety and ends with safety, and this safety goal applies to all aspects of the project and is taken very seriously. Bloodhound SSC cannot be built or completely maintained from ground level, this means that the engineers and technicians are required to work at height, and safely, and from the right equipment, and be trained to do so, that is where Working At Height come in. This is at the Bristol Technical Centre, on test in the UK and in the desert in South Africa, and Working At Height Limited as the exclusive product sponsor, trainers and advisors on the Work At Height Regulations plan to be on hand in all 3 locations and even hope to witness a successful attempt live in the desert, along with what should be the largest live global audience in history, seen via live television and streaming.

As the majority of Working At Height customers are engineers or involved in engineering in some form, then this should be of great interest, irresistibly so even! The project is described as an ‘Engineering Adventure’, and that could be said for all involved in engineering on a daily basis.

A Working At Height commitment to help ‘advance British engineering, science and maths, now and for the future’